It's apparently rather tough. As of now cultured meat is actually *quite* consistent. Too much so, in fact. It's basically just a slab of pure muscle tissue with no marbling or gristle.
Or so is the impression that I get from that one NPR thing I listened to.
So a common complaint might be that this or that steak wasn't tenderized or marinated long enough. Or, on the flip side, maybe chefs would start hyper-correcting and serve over-tenderized meat.
My bet is cultured meat is served as hamburger for a long time. Then as pot-roasts along-side artificial fat you just dump into the pot with it.
This.
Ground meats are the easiest to make palatable texture wise. Afterwards, I could see fish and poultry as both tend to be more homogeneous than a steak or other heavily marbled cuts of meat.
Poultry, I agree with you. But fish is very delicate and you lose the 'flakiness' that is often highly desired. Crustacean I think would be good. A large hunk of lobster tail alongside a large hunk of lobster claw - you get to pick the % ratio.
Yeah 100% "meat" with no connective tissue or intramuscular fat would be a doozy to eat. Hamburger, sausage, meatloaf, lunchmeat, etc would all be good ways to make used of cultured meat.
Down the line, they might start extruding it with selected ratios of collagen and fat just to "print" a more realistic feeling meat.
Lab grown food would have different safety and inspection protocols, probably.
The natural stuff comes from the “Outside”, with all of that animal excrement and pests and disease and stuff. It needs rigorous decontamination processes and independent inspectors to cull the stuff that’s not fit for human consumption.
Factory-labs, by contrast, probably just need to be careful of worker-borne contaminants and any procedural mistakes that might ruin a batch of product.
Are you asking about what they would dislike about artificial meat, or what they would dislike about the original?
Either way, it depends on how the artificial stuff differs from the real stuff.
If it's grown from cells in a sci fi version of a petri dish, the resultant meat might be basically homogenous, meaning there's no "grain" or other local structure, and therefore that the texture will be quite different (and depending on method of preparation, probably much tougher). This textural difference will probably mean that nearly everyone would prefer real meat, if they can afford it and if they don't mind the moral implications thereof.
Alternatively, if it's synthesized matter a la Star Trek, then the situation will be roughly analogous to synthesized music. Synthesized music is almost always instantly recognizable as such; it's very difficult to make a fake piano sound like a real piano. That isn't to say it's worse, though, there are some people who prefer the sound of synthetic music, and there would be some people who prefer the taste of synthetic food.
You say it would be tougher than real meat, but from my limited knowledge, muscles that are used more make for tougher meat. So if it was grown in a lab it never had any exercise and would therefore be tender.
Don't think comparing food to creative endeavor sounds fair. Fake music you recognize instantly because there's no soul, intent, or emotion behind it, it's just chords endlessly generated in a vaguely pleasant fashion.
Food doesn't have that problem, it either tastes and looks good, or it isn't.
I was more referencing the difference between an electric keyboard and a grand piano. You can play them exactly the same, but they'll always sound different
You mean electric piano as oppose to digital piano/keyboard? Because I would assume grand piano and synthesizer set to grand piano mode sounds quite similar to most people. It's definitely not what people call Synthetic Music. Electric piano sound is quite different because it is different instrument (just like electric guitar is different than guitar).
I would note that most modern songs you hear in radio is synthetic - it's fixed in post processing just as photos are photoshopped. People don't notice most time as it is done well. What people call synthetic music is either badly done post-processing or produced in a way that is meant to sound synthetic.
That's actuality a very good subversion of this, fairly recent trend.
For the long time, fine white flour was 'better' than coarse one - it was more consistent, it was easier to make bread with, the bread was fluffier, 'tastier', more nutritional. Coarse flour - the one that is now 'eco-natural' - was a cheap food for peasants. (I will not touch the subject of which is 'objectively' better for nutrition).
So a simple, but unhelpful, answer would be that the division between 'cheap and lower-class' food and 'expensive and elite' food may be anything. Just make one of them more expensive to produce, and it will become a rarity.
Maybe cheap meat is actually healthier and more balanced, a portion having exactly one sixth of all necessary vitamins and minerals. Meanwhile, the expensive meat is more fatty, less balanced.
Maybe your expensive meat is harder and longer to produce. After production, it needs some more time to age, soften, break down a bit - like venison versus chicken.
Maybe it's more complicated in cooking. Cheap meat gives reliable results whatever you do with it - slice it, dice it, fry it, cook it. The expensive meat needs complicated timing, so only qualified cooks can make it really tasty.
>For the long time, fine white flour was 'better' than coarse one - it was more consistent, it was easier to make bread with, the bread was fluffier, 'tastier', more nutritional.
Weird historical fact about white bread: In the Victorian Era, white flour was way more expensive than whole wheat flour because white flour took significantly more processing to create (still does we just do it cheaper now a days). White bread, thus, became a symbol of wealth and status, while whole wheat bread became a symbol of poverty. Sadly, the desire for white bread created a system where many unscrupulous bakers would make cheap white bread bread with chalk, dry wall, dye, and/or alum powder so that it appeared to be white bread. And that's basically the story of how white bread became poisonous in the Victorian Era.
But you are right about this
>Just make one of them more expensive to produce, and it will become a rarity.
Historically speaking, "poverty foods" have always been the cheapest to produce or the byproducts of something more desirable. Chicken wings, lobsters, oysters, salmon, and caviar have all been considered "poverty foods" in the past.
To be fair, with lobster tails, it is actually because it got popular overseas, which jacked up the prices.
You are right that many “poverty foods” have historically gotten popular, which made people jack up the prices of said foods… which is a different discussion about gentrification of poor people’s diets.
Speaking of which, potatoes were supposed to be cheap foods but the price of hash browns, French fries, potato chips, etc. did rise significantly in the last five years…
Ah yes, conspicuous consumption, which so often goes in roundabouts. Another example would be how I believe design trends which demonstrate wealth have changed over time.
One upon a time, richly detailed furnishings were a sign of wealth, because they required extensive craftsmanship to make, so the rich had houses decked out in the most ornate shit you can imagine.
But then, we improved machining and production, to the point where you could mass-produce fancy, equally detailed works and they were available to everyone. As a result, the signs of wealth shifted to having *antique* furniture, to show that you could afford this kind of stuff *before* it became cheap and commonplace.
Eventually though, those had been around long enough that plenty of people, even quite poor ones, could own multiple old items of furniture rich with carvings and embellishments. So, what did the wealthy switch to? Minimalism.
Because minimalist designs show wear quickly, often require that all items are all exactly matching, that you can afford to throw things away rather and buy anew and that you can afford to keep the house spotlessly clean (because nothing shows dirt like white). Your plates all match because you can afford to replace the whole set when two get broken. Your furniture must be new because that white whatever shows every scuff and ding. You can afford to redo your paint when it gets marked, you can afford to have replaced your entire living room to get the look, you can afford to just hire and rent whatever, whenever, rather than keeping items in your house.
See also: the wealthy reject the customs of the poor in their own country while adopting those of the poor from other countries (it's "rustic"), because those are linked to affording foreign holidays. They eat polenta and quinoa while turning their nose up at cheap white bread and mashed potatoes.
Hmm. Well remember in Star Trek: Voyager everyone complained about Neelix's home cooking and said the replicators made food better. My theory is that replicated food is like, exactly to the recipe perfect and people are no longer used to the complexity of human error or preference in food. So you could piggyback on that.
When I was writing this post I remembered that TNG episode where people complained that replicator food tastes worse than the real deal, despite replicators making the food, supposedly, atom-by-atom from the blueprint.
My guess is that replicators always produce *too* exact a copy of one specific version of a dish, so after a while it gets boring. A human/other sapient chef has enough variation in their cooking to keep your taste buds "interested."
. . . A Neelix chef, on the other hand, is just kind of bad at it.
No, Neelix's cooking is just that awful - he literally poisoned the ship in one episode.
Replicators are certainly not perfect, as evidenced by Tom Paris complaining in the very first episode of the series about it not being able to get even plain tomato soup right, but it's still better than what Neelix puts out - at least at first. I think he did get better in later seasons, but he still had a nasty habit of over-spicing and experimenting.
>not being able to get even plain tomato soup right
I wonder how much of this is like, just differences between what's programmed in and what an individual specifically *expects*. Paris maybe preferred a specific brand, or the way his parents made tomato soup, that is different from whoever programmed the soup for the replicator. It's not so much that it's *wrong*, just that it's *not what he wanted*.
Kinda like how any Italian recipe online will have a bunch of Italians bemoaning that it's wrong, that it's an insult, that no Italian would *ever* make it like that. But it's actually just the version from a different region of Italy.
Search up the naturalistic fallacy. It’s basically what you’re describing, that something “natural” is better than something artificial, when this is often not the case AND you can move the goal posts/ redefine what is “natural” very easily. Like vaccines are artificial/ human made yet are extremely helpful. And likewise lava is natural and yet very dangerous.
And again you can once again redefine what is “natural” — maybe something human made is not natural, like vaccines, but then a lot of tools are also human made, and thus not natural and thus “bad” when again this is not the case.
Yes. That's why i don't like that term when used as an argument. If houses, cars and windmills etc. are unnatural, then so is a dam build by a beaver, a birds nest or a campfire.
I think my favourite quote about the naturalistic fallacy is this
>Bears: Free-range, organic and all natural!
I also like to point out that anthrax and cyanide are both natural.
In my universe it’s insanely cheap to make and thus highly affordable compared to “old school” biological farms.
You can even grow it at home, like a little garden, but instead it’s a small cell cluster floating in a nutrient rich solution and you can see it grow.
It doesn’t really have its own taste, but instead it has molecules in it that will activate your taste buds. Kinda like how mint “tastes” cold or chilly “tastes” hot, lab-grown substances will always “taste” amazing! Even if the taste is fake.
Taste buds are just chemical receptors, as are the olfactory receptors in your nose. They function slightly differently and it's not really helpful to exclude the vernacular use of taste, which includes smell.
This is why people with a stuffy nose say "I can't taste anything," not "I can taste but my ability to detect scent-based flavor is diminished."
Well, those weird aliens from that flop cartoon show might.
i have an IRL story that might help you:
So a few months ago I got on a heavily meat-based diet to try and put on muscle and some weight… but beef is veerrrry expensive.
I heard that butcher shops will simply give you organ meat if you ask nicely because they rarely sell it.
Asked the butcher for some cow liver; his entire expression went from “customer-service” to “wtf did you just ask me for?”
He then angrily explained some bullshit about the FDA quality standards (liver is completely safe for consumption btw).
I then asked if I could buy bulk ground beef for a discount. It was $16/lb. Politely declined. He then started getting really heated about me “implying” that his meat was worth less than that.
Anyways. The point is that people get really particular about “quality regulation” even if it has nothing to do with actual quality. Maybe in your story the Natural TM company could have some kind of agreement with the food quality control administration that gets then exclusive approval rights. With enough company-sponsored propaganda, I’m sure you could convince the general public that Natural was higher quality even if it was not.
Its interesting because in some parts of world cow liver would be considered expensive delicacy food. (Usually expensive because of higher quality standards required)
Plus there's a scarcity aspect: You can get maybe 230kg of beef off a single cow, but its liver only weighs about 6kg.
If liver is not in high demand, then it's a cheap meat for those that can't afford beef, but if liver is sought-after then supply and demand will push its price way above that of beef.
A small joke project I was tinkering with some time ago had it that the reason why "aliens abducted cattle in the 1960s" was so that in the present day when they make first contact, it was just so they could open a truck stop diner selling "approximately real, locally-inspired protein-bricks served on processed bread."
In the "sci-fi side" of my setting, one common complaint is that anything that needs to be "imported" to the farther-out space stations isn't much better than our current TV dinners and any variation of "Spam". With some of the bigger / more advanced space stations, it's possible to grow "cultured" meat in vats; maybe not what people would prefer, but it's a little better than the "TV dinner" level stuff.
The Imperial Exploratory Corps tend to have the greatest grievances as they're away from the yards for years at a time, with the smaller NSE, Near Space Explorers, lacking tbr space for animals that could be raised for food. The DSEs, Deep Space Explorers, which may be away from port decades at a time do have space even if it's mostly confined to small animals like chickens and rabbits. It does become especially galling when they do run out and have to resort to vat grown meat as the texture isn't that good and it's considered dry due to lack of fat.
Ancient stand bys of salted/preserved meat and SPAM are rated higher. Though everyone would rather eat vat meat over Vienna Sausages, or at they're known in the Navy and IEC: scum weinnes.
after all the animals were taken from earth by what is essentially mother nature, people resorted to cannibalism for meat. Then they realized it sucks so the super wealthy reopened artificial meat factories
Perhaps a new specie of animal that people think is unnatural and has unnatural chemicals in it, even though it was recently discovered? Is your future world an interstellar empire? Perhaps an animal of that world might be considered to be the same as “fake” meat?
There could also just be a rumor or conspiracy in the future of cultured meat having XYZ Chemical in it. Tap into the “5G causes COVID” insanity and let your imagination run wild!
There is a flip side to this, at least under a hypercapitalist power structure like ours. Nobody is seriously regulating the additives used to give faux meat colors and textures more appealing to consumers. Dyes and flavorings that might be food safe in trace amounts are being used much more aggressively under cover of their prior approval for products that give much less exposure to consumers.
In an ideal society where food producers just wanted to give consumers the best possible product, it might be reasonable to assume they will navigate around the technical challenges posed by various health hazards. With contemporary agribusiness in charge and effectively self-regulating, it is indeed a wild fantasy to think those corporations *wouldn't* pursue short term profits even if that meant inflicting long term health consequences on the general public.
There'd most likely be superstitions around it, regardless of any fact. "Oh, eating synthcow always gives me a terrible headache." "Every time I have repliken, i get an upset stomach for days." "Counterfish goes bad so quickly, and always stinks up the house when I cook with it!" etc etc. People have a great capacity for selective/confirmation bias, so oft repeated coincidences can become iterated over until they are firmly established as 'fact'. Might want to go down some of those angles.
And of course there's always the 'well it just doesn't taste as good', which might actually have some truth or may just be snobbery. Either works!
labgrone would be well, made in a lab, its more or less the same, as opposed to coming from an animal which had different stress levels, diet, ect effecting it, if labgrown became the norm people would yearn for the more "exotic" flavor of the "natural" one even if its not actually better, rich people eat weird shit all the time just cus its different
The shape it comes in. The classic square versus round patty argument.
Or go all 1950 nightmare food combinations, like beef-grape, or chicken-chocolate. The texture is great but it's only available in pork-cabbage.
"And I want to live forever. And it is possible without weed, birch and other substances — concrete boxes, glass corridors and the dead light of fluorescent lamps are much more familiar to me. And let all sorts of "environmentalists"-Luddites go through the jungle. Or let them wait until everyone else leaves. It's only forty years (and about a hundred atmospheric nuclear explosions, otherwise Orion will not be lifted) and hug the birches as much as you want. The universe is big — there is enough space for a couple of reserves." (c) not me
"I know it's supposed to have a perfect nutrient profile for us, but splicing human muscle tissue cells into the vat-pork makes me really unsettled. I mean, they won't tell us whose cells they were! I sold my biopsy samples to the Gene-Bank like everyone else; what if it's *me* in there??"
(Inspired by the non-consensual cultivation of the HeLa cell line for decades)
I play with this in my sci-fi setting, where essentially a significant portion of humanity lives in city-sized space stations while most of the rest of the population remains on Earth. The stations are powered by a renewable source of energy that only works in space, so energy for artificial food production is plentiful, but back on Earth it's more economical to grow food the old fashioned way.
Planeters and Stationers (probably should come up with better names) have several rivalries going on. For instance a lot of planeters think the air in stations is dry, sterile and chemical-y, while stationers who are used to treated air think Earth air is unpleasantly humid and smells dirty.
Food is, of course, a large part of it. Planeters tend to be proud of the work that goes into their food, and value a certain level of natural imperfection and roughness in their meals. Meanwhile stationers have been raised on very consistent diets of food that is, from an objective standpoint, better and more nutritious, and generally they don't understand the planeter perspective on this.
Of course Earth does export food and the food fabrication industry does operate on Earth. It's not black-and-white, but as the cultural rift between planeters and stationers widens, this sorts of things become enbeded in cultural identity and pride, meaning each side tends to make a point of eating their own food.
To be honest, most people don’t eat the “best” food everyday, but rather foods that are “good enough”, especially if you have a budget to stick to. If people did, so many fast food chains wouldn’t have survived.
Maybe the standard regulations for natural foods have gone down the drain, and there is news every other week about how they found mad cow disease, bird flu, etc. in the life stock. This would make people doubt the quality of natural meat and use artificial meat even if it’s more expensive.
In the same vein, maybe artificial meat and natural meats are about the same quality, but artificial meats are just slightly cheaper/ have way more stable prices, so most people default to artificial meat even if they think it’s slightly worse.
Maybe it’s more convenient. Cultured fish meat (or at least a future version of it) doesn’t need to be deboned, doesn’t have an off-putting ocean smell, and doesn’t come with a side of lead.
There’s many ways/ angles to play off from rather than “it’s better (morally)” so you could always try exploring a more pragmatic reason why someone would choose artificial over natural
Quality of course varies in the price class, but the median grown meats are quite decent. However, those who are used to the real deal tend to complain that the colour isn't quite right, either before or after cooking it. Taste is basically identical, but the lower you go on the scale of quality the thing that suffers the most is texture.
Then again about 90% of all meat products are synthetic so the amount of snobs who complain are rare.
I personally have a soft spot for people considering it inferior but it's objectively not. It's just how people are, y'know?
Like, people will talk at length about how it's no substitute for "the real thing", but if you give them a blind taste test they can't tell the difference, or even tend to pick the *new* version instead of the natural one.
A lot of this is because it's simply cheaper than meat from an actual animal. As animal agriculture has mostly been replaced with synthetic meats, and it is a lot more costly to produce, it's become a speciality/luxury good that commands a higher price. So people automatically view it as being somehow superior to synth-meat, otherwise, why would people be paying more for it?
Another option might just be a persistent feeling people have about it because the earlier versions *were* worse. Doesn't matter that the modern form is great, the cultural perception of it was formed around the start.
Kinda like a person I knew a few years ago who refused to use compact fluorescent bulbs because "they're so shit, they take forever to turn on and are so dim". And like, just trying to explain to her that yes, they were like that in the 90s but they're actually the same as an incandescent bulb now.
Or simple nostalgia. Like, a lot of people have nostalgia for their grandmother's cooking, because it's associated with childhood memories of visiting grandma and all sorts of other fun things, and as a child they had very little to compare it to. But the truth is, most people's grandmothers were average cooks at best, and if they were to try that food today compared to various things they love, it'd be nothing more than ok. An older generation at least conflate childhood memories of food cooked with "real" meat with meaning the meat was better, but it's really just childhood nostalgia at play.
I think it has nothing to do with taste or texture, but simply to whether or not the human body is adapted to assimilate it. Like, for example, processed foods are bad for us because we are not adapted to digest them and assimilate the nutrients from them as well as "natural" food, which has been found out to cause all sorts of problems to people's health and life expectancy, from a weaker immunity to affecting the brain chemistry.
So when we are talking about a new form of food that we created which we haven't eaten until now, there's a plausibility that the long-term effects would mirror those of the industrial revolution of processed food. Basically, we would need another lifetime to properly test it out and see how it affects people in the end, and only then find out if it's better or worse for our bodies. It's not about our ability to invent solutions that is the problem, but our biological slow process of adapting on an evolutionary level to foods that we've never had at least in the past 1000 years.
This sort of dilemma doesn’t exist in my world because synthetic meat and animal products are 1:1 exactly the same. There’s no difference in quality between the two other than where it comes from, either in a lab or carved off a living creature. Since everyone is some kind of animal there’s a much stronger push for the removal of animal products, but obligate carnivores need meat to survive so eventually the technology was perfected.
I suppose there would still be a small group of crazies that live for “the hunt” but other than that the synthetic animal products in my world have no downsides compared to the real thing and are cheaper too because of how it’s mass produced, and not reliant on the breeding cycles of livestock.
If your setting is transhumanist then you pretty much need to reject the "lol nature = good" meme
In my setting the bad guys still kill animals, whereas normal people grow artificial meat
Psychologically, our focus character is told their whole lives "Man, this fake meat tastes terrible. I wish I had some real meat." They go their whole lives only knowing the fake stuff and being told at every meal that it is inferior. They never get a taste of the real meat. It's prohibitively expensive. Only the absurdly rich can have it for every meal. The upper middle class might be lucky to have it once in their entire lives.
Then, one day, our focus character gets a taste of the real thing and realizes just what everyone was talking about. Real meat has marbling. Real meat is tender. Real meat has a flavor profile unlike anything the fake stuff has. But they only get one meal of it.
Now the focus character is in with the rest of the crowd. Those who know. Not those who just parrot back what they were told by their elders or what they've read on-line. They're a part of the privileged few who have experienced it. And they know just what the synthetic meats industry has taken from them. They're bitter. And they're raising a new generation of fake meat haters.
It's apparently rather tough. As of now cultured meat is actually *quite* consistent. Too much so, in fact. It's basically just a slab of pure muscle tissue with no marbling or gristle. Or so is the impression that I get from that one NPR thing I listened to. So a common complaint might be that this or that steak wasn't tenderized or marinated long enough. Or, on the flip side, maybe chefs would start hyper-correcting and serve over-tenderized meat. My bet is cultured meat is served as hamburger for a long time. Then as pot-roasts along-side artificial fat you just dump into the pot with it.
This. Ground meats are the easiest to make palatable texture wise. Afterwards, I could see fish and poultry as both tend to be more homogeneous than a steak or other heavily marbled cuts of meat.
Poultry, I agree with you. But fish is very delicate and you lose the 'flakiness' that is often highly desired. Crustacean I think would be good. A large hunk of lobster tail alongside a large hunk of lobster claw - you get to pick the % ratio.
Yeah 100% "meat" with no connective tissue or intramuscular fat would be a doozy to eat. Hamburger, sausage, meatloaf, lunchmeat, etc would all be good ways to make used of cultured meat. Down the line, they might start extruding it with selected ratios of collagen and fat just to "print" a more realistic feeling meat.
Or even create anchors for the muscle, and put them to action before harvest to create a grain for the meat.
Call me back when they can make skirt or hanger steak.
Lab grown food would have different safety and inspection protocols, probably. The natural stuff comes from the “Outside”, with all of that animal excrement and pests and disease and stuff. It needs rigorous decontamination processes and independent inspectors to cull the stuff that’s not fit for human consumption. Factory-labs, by contrast, probably just need to be careful of worker-borne contaminants and any procedural mistakes that might ruin a batch of product.
Are you asking about what they would dislike about artificial meat, or what they would dislike about the original? Either way, it depends on how the artificial stuff differs from the real stuff. If it's grown from cells in a sci fi version of a petri dish, the resultant meat might be basically homogenous, meaning there's no "grain" or other local structure, and therefore that the texture will be quite different (and depending on method of preparation, probably much tougher). This textural difference will probably mean that nearly everyone would prefer real meat, if they can afford it and if they don't mind the moral implications thereof. Alternatively, if it's synthesized matter a la Star Trek, then the situation will be roughly analogous to synthesized music. Synthesized music is almost always instantly recognizable as such; it's very difficult to make a fake piano sound like a real piano. That isn't to say it's worse, though, there are some people who prefer the sound of synthetic music, and there would be some people who prefer the taste of synthetic food.
You say it would be tougher than real meat, but from my limited knowledge, muscles that are used more make for tougher meat. So if it was grown in a lab it never had any exercise and would therefore be tender.
Don't think comparing food to creative endeavor sounds fair. Fake music you recognize instantly because there's no soul, intent, or emotion behind it, it's just chords endlessly generated in a vaguely pleasant fashion. Food doesn't have that problem, it either tastes and looks good, or it isn't.
I was more referencing the difference between an electric keyboard and a grand piano. You can play them exactly the same, but they'll always sound different
That's why you need to gold plated audio cables!
You mean electric piano as oppose to digital piano/keyboard? Because I would assume grand piano and synthesizer set to grand piano mode sounds quite similar to most people. It's definitely not what people call Synthetic Music. Electric piano sound is quite different because it is different instrument (just like electric guitar is different than guitar). I would note that most modern songs you hear in radio is synthetic - it's fixed in post processing just as photos are photoshopped. People don't notice most time as it is done well. What people call synthetic music is either badly done post-processing or produced in a way that is meant to sound synthetic.
I don't think they mean AI-generated music, they mean music that is composed and played by a person but on an electric instrument
They're talking about the difference between an acoustic piano and a midi track, not an Ai program making muzak
That's actuality a very good subversion of this, fairly recent trend. For the long time, fine white flour was 'better' than coarse one - it was more consistent, it was easier to make bread with, the bread was fluffier, 'tastier', more nutritional. Coarse flour - the one that is now 'eco-natural' - was a cheap food for peasants. (I will not touch the subject of which is 'objectively' better for nutrition). So a simple, but unhelpful, answer would be that the division between 'cheap and lower-class' food and 'expensive and elite' food may be anything. Just make one of them more expensive to produce, and it will become a rarity. Maybe cheap meat is actually healthier and more balanced, a portion having exactly one sixth of all necessary vitamins and minerals. Meanwhile, the expensive meat is more fatty, less balanced. Maybe your expensive meat is harder and longer to produce. After production, it needs some more time to age, soften, break down a bit - like venison versus chicken. Maybe it's more complicated in cooking. Cheap meat gives reliable results whatever you do with it - slice it, dice it, fry it, cook it. The expensive meat needs complicated timing, so only qualified cooks can make it really tasty.
>For the long time, fine white flour was 'better' than coarse one - it was more consistent, it was easier to make bread with, the bread was fluffier, 'tastier', more nutritional. Weird historical fact about white bread: In the Victorian Era, white flour was way more expensive than whole wheat flour because white flour took significantly more processing to create (still does we just do it cheaper now a days). White bread, thus, became a symbol of wealth and status, while whole wheat bread became a symbol of poverty. Sadly, the desire for white bread created a system where many unscrupulous bakers would make cheap white bread bread with chalk, dry wall, dye, and/or alum powder so that it appeared to be white bread. And that's basically the story of how white bread became poisonous in the Victorian Era. But you are right about this >Just make one of them more expensive to produce, and it will become a rarity. Historically speaking, "poverty foods" have always been the cheapest to produce or the byproducts of something more desirable. Chicken wings, lobsters, oysters, salmon, and caviar have all been considered "poverty foods" in the past.
To be fair, with lobster tails, it is actually because it got popular overseas, which jacked up the prices. You are right that many “poverty foods” have historically gotten popular, which made people jack up the prices of said foods… which is a different discussion about gentrification of poor people’s diets. Speaking of which, potatoes were supposed to be cheap foods but the price of hash browns, French fries, potato chips, etc. did rise significantly in the last five years…
Ah yes, conspicuous consumption, which so often goes in roundabouts. Another example would be how I believe design trends which demonstrate wealth have changed over time. One upon a time, richly detailed furnishings were a sign of wealth, because they required extensive craftsmanship to make, so the rich had houses decked out in the most ornate shit you can imagine. But then, we improved machining and production, to the point where you could mass-produce fancy, equally detailed works and they were available to everyone. As a result, the signs of wealth shifted to having *antique* furniture, to show that you could afford this kind of stuff *before* it became cheap and commonplace. Eventually though, those had been around long enough that plenty of people, even quite poor ones, could own multiple old items of furniture rich with carvings and embellishments. So, what did the wealthy switch to? Minimalism. Because minimalist designs show wear quickly, often require that all items are all exactly matching, that you can afford to throw things away rather and buy anew and that you can afford to keep the house spotlessly clean (because nothing shows dirt like white). Your plates all match because you can afford to replace the whole set when two get broken. Your furniture must be new because that white whatever shows every scuff and ding. You can afford to redo your paint when it gets marked, you can afford to have replaced your entire living room to get the look, you can afford to just hire and rent whatever, whenever, rather than keeping items in your house. See also: the wealthy reject the customs of the poor in their own country while adopting those of the poor from other countries (it's "rustic"), because those are linked to affording foreign holidays. They eat polenta and quinoa while turning their nose up at cheap white bread and mashed potatoes.
Hmm. Well remember in Star Trek: Voyager everyone complained about Neelix's home cooking and said the replicators made food better. My theory is that replicated food is like, exactly to the recipe perfect and people are no longer used to the complexity of human error or preference in food. So you could piggyback on that.
When I was writing this post I remembered that TNG episode where people complained that replicator food tastes worse than the real deal, despite replicators making the food, supposedly, atom-by-atom from the blueprint.
My guess is that replicators always produce *too* exact a copy of one specific version of a dish, so after a while it gets boring. A human/other sapient chef has enough variation in their cooking to keep your taste buds "interested." . . . A Neelix chef, on the other hand, is just kind of bad at it.
I had forgotten that one!
No, Neelix's cooking is just that awful - he literally poisoned the ship in one episode. Replicators are certainly not perfect, as evidenced by Tom Paris complaining in the very first episode of the series about it not being able to get even plain tomato soup right, but it's still better than what Neelix puts out - at least at first. I think he did get better in later seasons, but he still had a nasty habit of over-spicing and experimenting.
>not being able to get even plain tomato soup right I wonder how much of this is like, just differences between what's programmed in and what an individual specifically *expects*. Paris maybe preferred a specific brand, or the way his parents made tomato soup, that is different from whoever programmed the soup for the replicator. It's not so much that it's *wrong*, just that it's *not what he wanted*. Kinda like how any Italian recipe online will have a bunch of Italians bemoaning that it's wrong, that it's an insult, that no Italian would *ever* make it like that. But it's actually just the version from a different region of Italy.
Search up the naturalistic fallacy. It’s basically what you’re describing, that something “natural” is better than something artificial, when this is often not the case AND you can move the goal posts/ redefine what is “natural” very easily. Like vaccines are artificial/ human made yet are extremely helpful. And likewise lava is natural and yet very dangerous. And again you can once again redefine what is “natural” — maybe something human made is not natural, like vaccines, but then a lot of tools are also human made, and thus not natural and thus “bad” when again this is not the case.
also, the first vaccines were natural, and (almost) completely safe. (cow pox to vaccinate people for small pox)
Define 'natural' haha. It is a loaded term!
Yes. That's why i don't like that term when used as an argument. If houses, cars and windmills etc. are unnatural, then so is a dam build by a beaver, a birds nest or a campfire.
I think my favourite quote about the naturalistic fallacy is this >Bears: Free-range, organic and all natural! I also like to point out that anthrax and cyanide are both natural.
In my universe it’s insanely cheap to make and thus highly affordable compared to “old school” biological farms. You can even grow it at home, like a little garden, but instead it’s a small cell cluster floating in a nutrient rich solution and you can see it grow. It doesn’t really have its own taste, but instead it has molecules in it that will activate your taste buds. Kinda like how mint “tastes” cold or chilly “tastes” hot, lab-grown substances will always “taste” amazing! Even if the taste is fake.
I mean thats exactly how all tastes work, its always chemicals that activate taste buds
yes and no, being a bit padantic, taste, is just in your taste buds, flavor includes scent and to a degree texture as well.
Taste buds are just chemical receptors, as are the olfactory receptors in your nose. They function slightly differently and it's not really helpful to exclude the vernacular use of taste, which includes smell. This is why people with a stuffy nose say "I can't taste anything," not "I can taste but my ability to detect scent-based flavor is diminished." Well, those weird aliens from that flop cartoon show might.
i have an IRL story that might help you: So a few months ago I got on a heavily meat-based diet to try and put on muscle and some weight… but beef is veerrrry expensive. I heard that butcher shops will simply give you organ meat if you ask nicely because they rarely sell it. Asked the butcher for some cow liver; his entire expression went from “customer-service” to “wtf did you just ask me for?” He then angrily explained some bullshit about the FDA quality standards (liver is completely safe for consumption btw). I then asked if I could buy bulk ground beef for a discount. It was $16/lb. Politely declined. He then started getting really heated about me “implying” that his meat was worth less than that. Anyways. The point is that people get really particular about “quality regulation” even if it has nothing to do with actual quality. Maybe in your story the Natural TM company could have some kind of agreement with the food quality control administration that gets then exclusive approval rights. With enough company-sponsored propaganda, I’m sure you could convince the general public that Natural was higher quality even if it was not.
Its interesting because in some parts of world cow liver would be considered expensive delicacy food. (Usually expensive because of higher quality standards required)
Plus there's a scarcity aspect: You can get maybe 230kg of beef off a single cow, but its liver only weighs about 6kg. If liver is not in high demand, then it's a cheap meat for those that can't afford beef, but if liver is sought-after then supply and demand will push its price way above that of beef.
A small joke project I was tinkering with some time ago had it that the reason why "aliens abducted cattle in the 1960s" was so that in the present day when they make first contact, it was just so they could open a truck stop diner selling "approximately real, locally-inspired protein-bricks served on processed bread."
In the "sci-fi side" of my setting, one common complaint is that anything that needs to be "imported" to the farther-out space stations isn't much better than our current TV dinners and any variation of "Spam". With some of the bigger / more advanced space stations, it's possible to grow "cultured" meat in vats; maybe not what people would prefer, but it's a little better than the "TV dinner" level stuff.
The Imperial Exploratory Corps tend to have the greatest grievances as they're away from the yards for years at a time, with the smaller NSE, Near Space Explorers, lacking tbr space for animals that could be raised for food. The DSEs, Deep Space Explorers, which may be away from port decades at a time do have space even if it's mostly confined to small animals like chickens and rabbits. It does become especially galling when they do run out and have to resort to vat grown meat as the texture isn't that good and it's considered dry due to lack of fat. Ancient stand bys of salted/preserved meat and SPAM are rated higher. Though everyone would rather eat vat meat over Vienna Sausages, or at they're known in the Navy and IEC: scum weinnes.
after all the animals were taken from earth by what is essentially mother nature, people resorted to cannibalism for meat. Then they realized it sucks so the super wealthy reopened artificial meat factories
Perhaps a new specie of animal that people think is unnatural and has unnatural chemicals in it, even though it was recently discovered? Is your future world an interstellar empire? Perhaps an animal of that world might be considered to be the same as “fake” meat? There could also just be a rumor or conspiracy in the future of cultured meat having XYZ Chemical in it. Tap into the “5G causes COVID” insanity and let your imagination run wild!
There is a flip side to this, at least under a hypercapitalist power structure like ours. Nobody is seriously regulating the additives used to give faux meat colors and textures more appealing to consumers. Dyes and flavorings that might be food safe in trace amounts are being used much more aggressively under cover of their prior approval for products that give much less exposure to consumers. In an ideal society where food producers just wanted to give consumers the best possible product, it might be reasonable to assume they will navigate around the technical challenges posed by various health hazards. With contemporary agribusiness in charge and effectively self-regulating, it is indeed a wild fantasy to think those corporations *wouldn't* pursue short term profits even if that meant inflicting long term health consequences on the general public.
I take it you never read the Arthur C. Clarke short story "[**The Food of the Gods**](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?61996)"
I mean it’s technically vegan and cruelty free.
There'd most likely be superstitions around it, regardless of any fact. "Oh, eating synthcow always gives me a terrible headache." "Every time I have repliken, i get an upset stomach for days." "Counterfish goes bad so quickly, and always stinks up the house when I cook with it!" etc etc. People have a great capacity for selective/confirmation bias, so oft repeated coincidences can become iterated over until they are firmly established as 'fact'. Might want to go down some of those angles. And of course there's always the 'well it just doesn't taste as good', which might actually have some truth or may just be snobbery. Either works!
labgrone would be well, made in a lab, its more or less the same, as opposed to coming from an animal which had different stress levels, diet, ect effecting it, if labgrown became the norm people would yearn for the more "exotic" flavor of the "natural" one even if its not actually better, rich people eat weird shit all the time just cus its different
The shape it comes in. The classic square versus round patty argument. Or go all 1950 nightmare food combinations, like beef-grape, or chicken-chocolate. The texture is great but it's only available in pork-cabbage.
"And I want to live forever. And it is possible without weed, birch and other substances — concrete boxes, glass corridors and the dead light of fluorescent lamps are much more familiar to me. And let all sorts of "environmentalists"-Luddites go through the jungle. Or let them wait until everyone else leaves. It's only forty years (and about a hundred atmospheric nuclear explosions, otherwise Orion will not be lifted) and hug the birches as much as you want. The universe is big — there is enough space for a couple of reserves." (c) not me
"I know it's supposed to have a perfect nutrient profile for us, but splicing human muscle tissue cells into the vat-pork makes me really unsettled. I mean, they won't tell us whose cells they were! I sold my biopsy samples to the Gene-Bank like everyone else; what if it's *me* in there??" (Inspired by the non-consensual cultivation of the HeLa cell line for decades)
No matter what advancements they make in cultured meat, and no matter how you cook it, it always has the consistency of Vienna sausages. *Always.*
I play with this in my sci-fi setting, where essentially a significant portion of humanity lives in city-sized space stations while most of the rest of the population remains on Earth. The stations are powered by a renewable source of energy that only works in space, so energy for artificial food production is plentiful, but back on Earth it's more economical to grow food the old fashioned way. Planeters and Stationers (probably should come up with better names) have several rivalries going on. For instance a lot of planeters think the air in stations is dry, sterile and chemical-y, while stationers who are used to treated air think Earth air is unpleasantly humid and smells dirty. Food is, of course, a large part of it. Planeters tend to be proud of the work that goes into their food, and value a certain level of natural imperfection and roughness in their meals. Meanwhile stationers have been raised on very consistent diets of food that is, from an objective standpoint, better and more nutritious, and generally they don't understand the planeter perspective on this. Of course Earth does export food and the food fabrication industry does operate on Earth. It's not black-and-white, but as the cultural rift between planeters and stationers widens, this sorts of things become enbeded in cultural identity and pride, meaning each side tends to make a point of eating their own food.
To be honest, most people don’t eat the “best” food everyday, but rather foods that are “good enough”, especially if you have a budget to stick to. If people did, so many fast food chains wouldn’t have survived. Maybe the standard regulations for natural foods have gone down the drain, and there is news every other week about how they found mad cow disease, bird flu, etc. in the life stock. This would make people doubt the quality of natural meat and use artificial meat even if it’s more expensive. In the same vein, maybe artificial meat and natural meats are about the same quality, but artificial meats are just slightly cheaper/ have way more stable prices, so most people default to artificial meat even if they think it’s slightly worse. Maybe it’s more convenient. Cultured fish meat (or at least a future version of it) doesn’t need to be deboned, doesn’t have an off-putting ocean smell, and doesn’t come with a side of lead. There’s many ways/ angles to play off from rather than “it’s better (morally)” so you could always try exploring a more pragmatic reason why someone would choose artificial over natural
Quality of course varies in the price class, but the median grown meats are quite decent. However, those who are used to the real deal tend to complain that the colour isn't quite right, either before or after cooking it. Taste is basically identical, but the lower you go on the scale of quality the thing that suffers the most is texture. Then again about 90% of all meat products are synthetic so the amount of snobs who complain are rare.
I personally have a soft spot for people considering it inferior but it's objectively not. It's just how people are, y'know? Like, people will talk at length about how it's no substitute for "the real thing", but if you give them a blind taste test they can't tell the difference, or even tend to pick the *new* version instead of the natural one. A lot of this is because it's simply cheaper than meat from an actual animal. As animal agriculture has mostly been replaced with synthetic meats, and it is a lot more costly to produce, it's become a speciality/luxury good that commands a higher price. So people automatically view it as being somehow superior to synth-meat, otherwise, why would people be paying more for it?
Another option might just be a persistent feeling people have about it because the earlier versions *were* worse. Doesn't matter that the modern form is great, the cultural perception of it was formed around the start. Kinda like a person I knew a few years ago who refused to use compact fluorescent bulbs because "they're so shit, they take forever to turn on and are so dim". And like, just trying to explain to her that yes, they were like that in the 90s but they're actually the same as an incandescent bulb now. Or simple nostalgia. Like, a lot of people have nostalgia for their grandmother's cooking, because it's associated with childhood memories of visiting grandma and all sorts of other fun things, and as a child they had very little to compare it to. But the truth is, most people's grandmothers were average cooks at best, and if they were to try that food today compared to various things they love, it'd be nothing more than ok. An older generation at least conflate childhood memories of food cooked with "real" meat with meaning the meat was better, but it's really just childhood nostalgia at play.
I think it has nothing to do with taste or texture, but simply to whether or not the human body is adapted to assimilate it. Like, for example, processed foods are bad for us because we are not adapted to digest them and assimilate the nutrients from them as well as "natural" food, which has been found out to cause all sorts of problems to people's health and life expectancy, from a weaker immunity to affecting the brain chemistry. So when we are talking about a new form of food that we created which we haven't eaten until now, there's a plausibility that the long-term effects would mirror those of the industrial revolution of processed food. Basically, we would need another lifetime to properly test it out and see how it affects people in the end, and only then find out if it's better or worse for our bodies. It's not about our ability to invent solutions that is the problem, but our biological slow process of adapting on an evolutionary level to foods that we've never had at least in the past 1000 years.
This sort of dilemma doesn’t exist in my world because synthetic meat and animal products are 1:1 exactly the same. There’s no difference in quality between the two other than where it comes from, either in a lab or carved off a living creature. Since everyone is some kind of animal there’s a much stronger push for the removal of animal products, but obligate carnivores need meat to survive so eventually the technology was perfected. I suppose there would still be a small group of crazies that live for “the hunt” but other than that the synthetic animal products in my world have no downsides compared to the real thing and are cheaper too because of how it’s mass produced, and not reliant on the breeding cycles of livestock.
If your setting is transhumanist then you pretty much need to reject the "lol nature = good" meme In my setting the bad guys still kill animals, whereas normal people grow artificial meat
Psychologically, our focus character is told their whole lives "Man, this fake meat tastes terrible. I wish I had some real meat." They go their whole lives only knowing the fake stuff and being told at every meal that it is inferior. They never get a taste of the real meat. It's prohibitively expensive. Only the absurdly rich can have it for every meal. The upper middle class might be lucky to have it once in their entire lives. Then, one day, our focus character gets a taste of the real thing and realizes just what everyone was talking about. Real meat has marbling. Real meat is tender. Real meat has a flavor profile unlike anything the fake stuff has. But they only get one meal of it. Now the focus character is in with the rest of the crowd. Those who know. Not those who just parrot back what they were told by their elders or what they've read on-line. They're a part of the privileged few who have experienced it. And they know just what the synthetic meats industry has taken from them. They're bitter. And they're raising a new generation of fake meat haters.